House Panel Opens Probe of NIH Officials Allegedly Evading FOIA on COVID Origins

Dr. Davis Morens, a longtime adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, in Washington on May 22, 2024. U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic via The Epoch Times

WASHINGTON—House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) is opening an investigation of official emails, text messages, and related documents about alleged efforts “at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency” about the origins of COVID-19.

The NIH is the National Institutes of Health, and the NIAID is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH. The coronavirus, which originated in China, has killed more than 1.2 million Americans since January 2020.

“Newly uncovered documents show that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senior Adviser, Dr. David Morens, consulted with the NIH Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office on best practices for deleting official records,” Mr. Wenstrup said in a statement on May 28.

Mr. Morens testified on May 22 before the select subcommittee regarding his FOIA practices at NIH and repeatedly professed, when questioned by members of the panel, not to remember details related to his emails to Dr. Fauci and others.

The recently retired Dr. Fauci was NIAID director for many years and a highly visible public health adviser to Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the pandemic. He was also the highest-paid employee when he left the government last year.

“Dr. Morens went so far as to write in one email ‘i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear,’” Mr. Wenstrup said. “The documents also show that Dr. Morens gave his ‘best friend’ and controversial NIH grant recipient, EcoHealth Alliance Inc.(EcoHealth) President Dr. Peter Daszak, preferential treatment by forwarding him potentially damaging FOIA productions prior to public release.”

The select subcommittee chairman also pointed to emails from Greg Folkers, former chief of staff to Dr. Fauci at NIAID and others, in which Mr. Folkers described being told by the NIH FOIA office that misspelled words can evade document searches based on key terms.

As an illustration of this tactic, Mr. Wenstrup pointed to a Nov. 7, 2021, email from Mr. Folkers in which a “$” is substituted for the “e” in virologist Kristian Andersen’s last name. Mr. Andersen, a professor at Scripps Research, was one of the three scientists behind a February 2020 paper that said COVID-19 “is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus.”

Days before the publication of that paper, Mr. Andersen was part of a conference call with Dr. Fauci, NIH officials, and other scientists to discuss the possibility the virus was engineered or from a lab leak, according to emails.

In a June 4, 2021, Folkers email, “EcoHealth” is spelled “Ec~Health.” EcoHealth refers to the EcoHealth Alliance, the New York-based nonprofit that channeled funds received from NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

“This evasion tactic ensures that when the NIH searches its email server for keywords that are responsive to a FOIA request, Mr. Folkers’s emails that contain the misspelled keyword are not identified or produced as a responsive document,” Mr. Wenstrup said.

“If what appears in these documents is true, this is an apparent attack on public trust and must be met with swift enforcement and consequences for those involved.”

An NIH spokesman didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on the subcommittee’s actions. A spokesman for the NIH FOIA office couldn’t be reached for comment. Mr. Folkers didn’t respond to a request for comment.

For more than a year, the select subcommittee has sought extensive documentation of NIH and NIAID knowledge concerning the origins of COVID-19. Congressional investigators have repeatedly had to issue subpoenas to obtain the requested documentation.

Leading officials in NIH, NIAID, and elsewhere in the federal government, including Dr. Fauci most prominently, have insisted the virus most likely migrated to humans from bats via a fish market in Wuhan, China.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) speaks to reporters during a break from a meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who was testifying before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in Washington on Jan. 8, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

However, legions of public health and private medicine experts have disputed such an origin, contending the evidence within the virus itself and extensive government documentation indicate a leak from the WIV as the most likely source.

The FOIA was passed on a bipartisan basis by Congress in 1966 and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The law provides that all federal documents are presumed to be available to members of the public on request unless they are exempted from disclosure by one or more of the nine statutory exemptions.

Of those exemptions, federal officials most frequently cite the ones covering national security, ongoing law enforcement investigations, personal privacy, and protection of commercial secrets.

Exemption Five, which enables federal officials to withhold documents created prior to a government decision, is the most frequently cited of the nine and is known informally among many advocates for transparency and accountability as the “withhold it because you want to” exemption.

Gary Ruskin, executive director of the U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit transparency advocacy group that focuses primarily on public health issues, told The Epoch Times that the NIH may be the worst offender among all federal agencies.

“I started doing public interest work in 1987. This is the worst federal agency stonewalling I have ever seen,” Mr. Rogers said. “NIH’s FOIA evasion serves the American people poorly and raises still more questions about what it was hiding and why.”

He lauded the select subcommittee for “doing a great job,” saying: “It is just starting to obtain and make public some evidence about how NIH evaded FOIA requests about COVID origins. It is hard to give a fuller sense of it all without all of the evidence that the select subcommittee is obtaining.”

Another transparency advocate, Open the Books founder and President Adam Andrzejewski, told The Epoch Times that his group is currently involved in six federal lawsuits seeking to force NIH to comply with FOIA disclosure requirements.

“NIH treats every freedom of information request as World War III,” he said. "Here’s the stonewalling strategy NIH uses to obfuscate federal open records law. First, they ignore the request, which forces federal litigation.

“When they lose, NIH blanks out and heavily redacts the documents—making the production virtually worthless. Then, we go back to court to get an order to un-redact the redactions. The entire process takes hundreds of thousands of dollars and years to complete.

“This pattern of behavior goes beyond privacy concerns or agency mismanagement; it illustrates the contempt for transparency that we finally saw explicitly in Dr. Morens’s emails.”